


Civic Duty

by meaninglessblah



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Case Fic, Civilian Jason Todd, Gen, Identity Porn, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-19 14:57:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22779580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meaninglessblah/pseuds/meaninglessblah
Summary: Jason wakes with no ID, no phone, and no memory of the last twenty years of his life. And all he's got to show for it is a godawful amount of scars and a spinal injury.But he's resourceful, so Jason gets himself a job as a courier with the local mob, finds a new apartment, and tries to settle into his new, piecemeal life. No matter how much it doesn't seem to want to settle into him.It'd be nice if the over-invested vigilantes tailing him could stay well enough away too.
Comments: 46
Kudos: 239





	Civic Duty

“Alright, sweetheart, hold your arms out, chest height - perfect. Hold them there for me?” 

Jason exhales slowly, letting his muscles set in the pose as he watches the nurse’s gaze flicker over his body, and then up to meet his eyes briefly. She smiles warmly, like she thinks he needs the reassurance, and Jason doesn’t return it. 

“Good, good,” she soothes finally, so he lowers his arms again. “Motor reflexes seem to be good, and you’re holding your own weight, which is an improvement.” 

Her eyes crinkle quickly as she flashes another smile, like she’s worried he might panic at the assessment if she doesn’t. Jason wonders if he’s usually a nervous wreck, or if this woman is just being overcautious because he has a spinal injury. He returns it nonetheless, if only so she stops trying to assure him he’s fine. 

He feels fine. The pain is manageable, a dull ache now that he’s had a few weeks rest and some decent opioids in his system. Jason did a personal stock take when he woke up this morning, like he does every morning, and he’s concluded that, for the most part, being up and functional makes him fine. 

By his best estimation, Jason got hit by a fucking semi. He’s got extensive bruising over the back of his hip and the entire left side of his lower back, to marry up the locked muscles trailing down behind his shoulder blades. He’s been informed that he has some spinal displacement, which really is just a fancy way of saying someone took his spine and bent it two inches too far to the right. 

The vertebrae are mostly intact, aside from some minor fractures, according to the five x-rays Jason’s undergone. There’s still some debate as to whether his cord’s more damaged than he’s letting on. Jason’s been entirely forthcoming in their self-measuring neurological tests, but they still suspect he’s not being entirely truthful with them. 

Jason has no clue why they think he’d lie about his condition, but he was too distracted by the blinding ache in his skull and his three fractured ribs to care at the time. 

They also think he’s lying about how much he remembers, but Jason’s definitely not. Getting clipped upside the head presumably by an eighteen-wheeler seems to have had the nasty effect of wiping clean the slate of Jason’s memory. He doesn’t have anything on tap for the last two days. Or the last two weeks, for that matter. 

The last twenty years? That’s another can of worms. 

Jason knows a few things. Knows his name, for a start. Knows he’s about twenty or twenty-three, depending on exactly where his hard but youthful facial features get off. Knows he’s working with about two-hundred pounds of muscle that feels like it’s been a work-in-progress for at least a decade, for Lord knows what reason. Even without the startling gap in his medical history (The resident attending, Dr Thompkins, had pulled his file for him when he’d woken up without even an inkling of where he was or what he was doing here. She’d been the one to tell him his name, too.) Jason can tell he’s not the standard walk-in for Gotham General. 

The scars were a big tip off. He’d caught sight of them a few days in, when he’d finally been mobile enough to attempt a shower. Had stood in front of the mirror and gaped for a good five minutes while his nurse bustled about getting the temperature just right for him.

Jason doesn’t remember what the fuck he’s been doing for the past twenty years, but apparently it had a grudge. 

He hasn’t seen someone with scars like this since his consciousness came back online. And considering his only company has been the patients on his ward - trauma survivors, if he had to give them a name - the fact that he’s the youngest by a few decades and bears the most scars is saying something. 

Jason would give a lot to know how the hell someone of his age ends up looking like they’ve been shoved through a meat grinder and sewn back together. He’s pretty sure the handful of puckers that litter the sides and back of his torso, hitched up under his fractured ribs, are bullet holes. Which tells him he clearly didn’t grow up in some well-to-do brownstone on the Upper East side. 

The nurse shuffles over to her desktop to add a few notes to his charts, and Jason inspects his hands, for lack of something better to do. He’s got a lot of callouses, and his thumb’s been dislocated more than once, if how easy his thumb rotates in its socket is anything to go off. 

She gives a happy little chuckle when she pulls up his historical charts, compares his progress. Jason can’t make out anything more than lines and graphs. “You’re coming along quite nicely, actually. A much faster recovery than we anticipated.” The nurse tosses a smile over her shoulder at him. “You’ll be right as rain in no time.” 

_Sure,_ Jason thinks. 

“Good,” he says aloud. 

* * *

The day they discharge him, Jason goes to the library. 

He’s got nothing else on his mind (humour, always a good sign of cognitive reparation, Dr Thompkins had assured him around a wry smile), and nothing in the pockets of the thrift clothes the hospital had gifted him when he signed their departure waiver. No phone, no wallet. Just the clothes on his back and his own name on his lips. 

Jason doesn’t know where to start. But he does know he wants to go to the library. It feels safe, somehow. He can’t explain how or why, just that the thrum in his chest eases the second he strolls through the doors and inhales the musty odour of decade-old paper. 

He asks at the desk - mostly on a whim, somewhat out of forlorn desperation - if they remember seeing him in the library recently, but neither of the attending librarians can offer him any help. So he heads deep into the aisles and stews by himself in the classic literature section. 

Jason’s not sure what he had expected. Maybe for something to leap out at him, for some familiar detail to catch his eye. He feels calmer than he did under the clinical fluorescents of the hospital, but it’s a different feeling of home. Like a comforting dream, or a favourite plushie. The library feels important to him, but Jason can’t exactly discern why. 

He stays until after closing time, until the librarians reluctantly wave him out the door. He makes a point of asking when their opening hours are, and he’s pretty sure from the sympathetic pinches of their brows that they’ll expect him to be waiting when they reopen the doors tomorrow. 

It’s not until Jason’s milling around the poorly lit bus stop a few blocks down that he realises he should have asked about a library card. He might be in their system, and he knows his name; that’s a start. And more pressingly, it would mean he wouldn’t have had to smuggle the dog-eared copy of _Sense and Sensibility_ out under his jacket. 

He doesn’t know why he stole the book (and part of him flinches at stealing municipal resources). It’s just… stroking his thumb down the spine, it's the calmest Jason’s felt since he woke up with enough morphine in his system to down a horse. There’s something about the smell of the pages, their weight in his palm, that soothes him in its familiarity. And sue him, but Jason’s a little bit desperate to cling to anything that feels familiar at the moment. 

He’ll return the book, he promises the tattered remains of a poster plastered to the side of the bus stop, and scuffs his ill-fitting shoes on the pavement. He will. He definitely will. 

Next week, he tells himself, and pushes to his feet when the headlights of the bus sweep over him. It’s not like anyone’s going to miss one little misplaced book. 

After all, no one seems to be missing one misplaced man. 

* * *

Jason washes out of six job interviews in the first month. 

He’s got no ID, no employment history that he can find ( _ever_ ), and no long-term residential address. It’s a recipe for disaster, and Jason doesn’t know how he’s going to fix the issue. 

The ID part is simple enough. Apparently the semi had mugged him when it’d ploughed through Jason like wet tissue paper, because the hospital had admitted him without a wallet or phone. He tried getting a driver’s licence reissued at the DMV, but without any corroborating ID and no real grasp on any of his own personal details, the clerk had shushed him out of the building with an unsympathetic and suspicious glare. He must have had a licence, Jason reasons, because he can drive. Muscle memory had proven that much. But apparently there’s been no record of a licence issued to one Jason Peter Todd of Gotham City, New Jersey before. 

The employment history is surprising but not shocking. He’s twenty. He figures he must have been a student (lost that ID too, he supposes) or had an under-the-table cash job. They’re the regular in the pockets of Gotham Jason’s familiar with, so that explains why he hasn’t got a single good reference to his name. It’s unfortunate, but he can work past it. He’s young, and aside from a slightly off-centre spine now, physically fit. He can pick up a dishwashing gig or construction work. Seasonal jobs. 

The residential address and the incumbent living expenses have been handled. Dr Thompkins had informed him when she’d discharged him that she’d submitted a request to the Wayne Medical Foundation to cover his medical expenses. The bills had arrived a week later with a thick red “paid” stamp emblazoned across them, and an accompanying letter informing him that he was eligible for a further grant that would hit his bank account within the next 3-4 business days. 

Jason hadn’t complained, because he had no cash to his name and no idea which bank he held an account with, _if_ he even had one. The Wayne Foundation had apparently set one up for him, temporarily, and Jason had cracked it to stock the pantry with when he’d gotten the keys to his SRO. 

It’s another part of the Wayne scheme. Affordable, low income housing with the first three months rent paid to help the recently medically ailed get the breathing space to get back on their feet. Jason appreciates it more than he’d care to admit. 

The Wayne Foundation agent who visits him after the first week spreads out several folders on his pokey dining table and energetically walks him through his options. By the end of it, Jason’s head’s spinning worse than when he’d collapsed in the shower that morning after pulling a back muscle. 

He’ll have to move out of Wayne Foundation housing after the grace period, she informs him, but he has options for subsidised housing in downtown Gotham. She talks him through several decent looking rentals that Jason feels no particular attachment to one way or another, so he picks a niche little one bedroom in the Narrows that doesn’t look too rundown. 

The conversation about employment doesn’t go as smoothly, but the agent does assure him that there’s several programs with the Wayne Foundation for disability grants. Call him a martyr, but Jason thinks there’s far more deserving people than him for that money. He’ll get a job, he tells her. It’s just a matter of getting the right opportunity. 

That optimistic nugget gets her off his back for a while, and Jason resolves to start applying to every dirty under-the-table cash job he can possibly sniff out. He doesn’t know what he was like before, but being an indefinite charity case just doesn’t sit comfortably with him. Maybe he’s just too independent to be beholden to a sleek, shiny foundation like the Waynes’. Either way, it leaves a crawling feeling up Jason’s spine whenever the agent mentions another grant. 

The day after the agent visits him, Jason hits up all the greasy food joints in downtown Gotham. Pounding pavement has never steered him wrong before, but try as he might, not a single person is willing to look past his bulk or his limp to give him a chance. 

He’s practically begging across the counter of the last bar in Gotham when someone siddles up beside him with a chirp of recognition. 

The man is a shrimpy twig of a thing, looking even more slight next to Jason’s stature, but there’s a casual drawl to his tone, and a welcoming quirk to his lip that gives Jason pause. That, and he’s the first person to call Jason by name. 

“Jay?” he asks, pointing a finger at him. As if there was anyone else at the bar at 2pm in the afternoon. “From Fleek Street, right? It’s Rodney, from up on McCaulley.” 

Jason’s struck out at thirty-seven bodegas and sixty bars. He cracks a smile he hopes is convincing. “Rodney, hey! I almost didn’t recognise you there.” 

“It’s been a damn while,” the man - Rodney, apparently - agrees with a relieved grin, and looks Jason up and down pointedly. “Shit, but you sure packed it on, didn’t you, big guy? I remember when a stiff breeze would blow you over. Sure made good for squeezing into tight places though, am I right?” 

From the conspiratorial pat he lands on the bicep Jason has turned towards him, he deduces they’ve known each other for a while. Since they were kids, from the sounds of it. But haven’t seen each other for several years. Jason can work with that. 

“What can I say? Eat your brussel sprouts and drink your milk,” Jason returns cheesily, and waits for Rodney to laugh. “What have you been up to since I saw you last?” 

Rodney slides his hands into his pockets, and Jason notices that he’s wearing an unfitted but neatly put-together suit. He shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Been getting work down by the docks.” 

He doesn’t look like he’d be able to pull a tinny ashore on a clear day. Jason straightens at the realisation that his work probably isn’t legitimate. 

“Was looking for some applicants, actually,” Rodney says, like they’re talking about some fancy office job. “Had some openings. Couldn’t help but overhear you’re in the market for decent work.” 

Openings, Jason thinks, sure. No doubt cleared with a tommy gun. He might as well have been born yesterday for all the good his nonexistent memory is doing him, but Jason can spot a mob deal when he sees one. 

“What sort of work?” he asks, because Jason wants to work, spinal injury be damned. Anything to feel like his life has some routine, has some order to it. He’ll take what he can get. Beggars and choosers and all that. 

Rodney shrugs again, looks a little tense. “Same stuff as we used to do. Some basic enforcement. Mostly courier work, still.” 

Jason hums at that, holds Rodney’s piercing gaze like they’re old friends and didn’t meet two minutes ago. “Lots of packages to move in downtown Gotham,” Jason agrees, and that seems to sate Rodney a bit, because he smiles. 

“Let me buy you a drink,” he offers, and that sounds magnificent to Jason right now, “and we can talk about it at length.” 

“Whiskey,” Jason responds. “Neat.” 

It’s not like his life can get any more fucked than it seems to already be. And if that isn’t the providential equivalent of waving a red flag at the universe, Jason doesn’t know what is. 

He follows Rodney through to the back of the bar and signs his future away over a handshake and a double shot of dry whiskey.

**Author's Note:**

> So, like a no capes fic, but still with all the capes? 
> 
> I thought, of all the Bats, Jason's tumultuous past would put him in a unique position were he to contract amnesia. Dying as a teenager kind of makes it hard to pull the pieces of your life together, and that's without even counting Bruce and Oracle's measures to scour public records clean. Makes for an interesting setting to drop Jason in. 
> 
> This has been plaguing me for a while, and this chapter is shorter than I'd like. But I want to get to the good part, where Jason's meddling family can't help but interfere. So I posted it. Might come back later and amend it, but here it is for now. 
> 
> [Meaninglessblah](https://linktr.ee/meaninglessblah).


End file.
